I Know
by IronicNarwhal
Summary: Jane T. Kirk is beautiful and smart and jaded and Leonard loves her. Sometimes it's not easy to get the words out. Other times, it's not hard at all.


**I Know**

* * *

"It is really stupidly cold in here."

Leonard takes one glance at Jane and decides that he's going to have no pity for her. "You're wearing shorts and a sweatshirt. Do you know how much of a contradiction you are just by existing in the state you're in right now?" With that, he turns back to his console because he's got an Advanced Xenophysiology final in three days and, even though he's passed the course with flying colors, he's still completely terrified of the infamous final that comes out of that class.

"Are you _still_ studying?"

This time he doesn't even bother glancing at her. "Yes."

"You're gonna pass, Bones."

Leonard rolls his eyes. "You know, maybe you should study for once instead of just sitting around and waiting for a good grade to fall into your lap." At this point he's already spent a year and a half in Jane's company, so he's aware of her usual pattern. Put off studying until the last possible minute, cram all the information she needs into her mind at once, and pass the test with flying colors. He's jealous of her, to be honest. She's a fucking genius and she makes everything look so easy.

"Studying is boring," mutters Jane, falling back onto the bed. "Honestly, I think it does more harm than good the way you do it. How do you deal with so much information just stewing in your brain? I have to take it in all at once or it doesn't stick." She flops over onto her stomach and sighs loudly, pointedly. Her entire demeanor screams _pay attention to me!_

"Maybe so, but it's also fucking necessary," Leonard mutters, and sets down one PADD while picking up another.

"Hey."

There's something in Jane's voice that makes him look up, despite promising himself less than ten seconds ago that he was not going to let her distract him. She's propped up on his pillow, smooth shaven legs waving around behind her, and head resting on her small, delicate hands. She's a little thing, Jane is, and sometimes Leonard forgets because her personality fills all the space she doesn't.

"What?" he mumbles.

"Who's the top of the medical track in our class?" she asks.

"I won't know that until grades come in at the end of the semester—"

"Don't fucking bullshit me, Bones, you know it's you," Jane mutters. "You're doing fucking awesome, alright? I know you've got that whole crippling fear of failure thing going on, but take it from someone who spent most of her life as a royal fuck-up: You're gonna do great. Give yourself some credit and relax." Her blue eyes shine intensely from below her golden blonde fringe, and Leonard's hand twitched to touch her face.

With a sigh, he pushes away from his desk and sets down the PADDs. Jane grins in triumph and rolls back onto her back, to make room for him to lay next to her on the bed. For a few minutes, they stare at the ceiling together.

Jane squeezes his hand. "You're awesome," she murmurs into his ear. "Don't let anyone tell you you're not. Not even yourself. You shouldn't sell yourself short, y'know?"

Leonard could kiss her. Instead, he squeezes back and closes his eyes and enjoys her warmth next to him. "I know."

* * *

For a second, Leonard thinks his dog has come inside from getting soaked in the rain crawled onto bed with him. Then he realizes that the dog was one of the things that Jocelyn took in the divorce and he hasn't had that dog for two years. When he realizes this, he sits up and shoots an arm out to turn on the light, only to realize that it's Jane; motherfucking Jane Kirk has crawled into bed with him, soaking fucking wet for whatever reason, and now she's laying there looking completely pitiful and sad.

"What happened?" he demands.

"I just…I didn't want to be alone," she mumbles. "I had a nightmare."

"So you came halfway cross campus in the rain so you could sleep with me?"

Jane rolls her eyes. "Whatever. Sorry." She makes a move to get out of the bed, but Leonard grabs onto her arm and she almost too willingly rolls back towards him, face somewhat crumpled in.

"No, it's fine," Leonard mumbles. "I didn't mean to—Jane. What's the matter? Why are you crying?"

"I don't know!" Jane cries, and flings a hand over her eyes. "I don't know, leave me the fuck alone!" She flips over onto her side and brings her knees up and her shoulders down so she's essentially a ball on the edge of Leonard's bed. He spends literally three minutes wriggling his hand by her thighs and over her stomach, to pull her towards him. The front of his shirt is immediately damp, and it's not exactly ideal for sleeping, but it's not the moment to care about such things.

"Shhh," he murmurs into her ear, like she is indeed the volatile animal he thought she was when she first appeared. "You're fine. You're okay. You're alright, sugar."

Jane inhales through her mouth. It's a gasping, guttural sound that speaks of burning lumps caught in throats and lungs that feel too small to hold all the misery they need to contain. She drapes her much leaner arm over his and clutches his hand and her shoulders shake in a sob.

"I'm here," he murmurs, and kisses her temple. "I'm here," he says, and kisses her jaw.

They're laying there for an immeasurable amount of time, probably ten minutes but maybe as long as thirty. He doesn't know, because for a few minutes time doesn't really seem to pass or exist. It's him and Jane, and they're laying there and he's holding her and things are, very strangely, alright. Even though Jane's breath still hitches every few minutes, it's peaceful and Leonard can hear himself humming something, even though he isn't really making a conscious decision to make the noise.

"Hold me," Jane whispers.

"I am," Leonard replies. "I'm not lettin' go."

His limps seem to not so much surround her as shift to conform to her basic shape. He arm that isn't over her stomach arches over her head, his legs curve so that his thighs bump against hers and her heels are pressed against his legs.

"There's something you should know about me," Jane whispers.

"Yeah?"

"I was on Tarsus."

It takes him longer than it should to make the connection. Tarsus is not a word that he's heard in ten years, but that doesn't mean he's forgotten the summer that the entire Federation was knocked sideways on its axis by the news that some Eugenicist straight out of the Wars had implemented a policy on a famine-ridden planet that sentenced 4000 people to death.

"Okay," he says slowly, and secures his arm more tightly around her.

"I was on the kill list," she says, "because I was a juvenile delinquent. And I had blue eyes."

Leonard loves those blue eyes. He wonders if every time Jane looks in the mirror she sees something that almost got her killed.

"You're alive," Leonard reminds her.

"I know," Jane says, "and sometimes I wish I wasn't."

"No you fucking _do not_," Leonard snaps.

Jane goes stiff and eventually mumbles, "I know…" but she never, never again, mentions wishing she'd died on that rock before she'd even met Leonard and put his life back on fucking track.

* * *

"Hey."

Even though she'd actually announced her presence by bursting in the room and throwing her book bag against the wall and flopping onto the bed to straddle Leonard's hips, she supplements the actions with the word and falls forward until she catches herself with her hands on Leonard's shoulders.

"Hi," he says, lowering his PADD with an eyebrow raised. "What's…up?"

"Umm…nothing much," Jane says, shrugs, and sits up and stretches her arms high above her head. Blowing a lock of hair away, she squeezes her eyes shut mid-stretch and groans when her back cracks. Leonard winces at the noise, but Jane sighs pleasurably and relaxes again, slightly more boneless. Looking down at him, she adds, "I'm fucking horny. Are you horny?"

For a second, he thinks she says _hungry_ because there's no way that someone just casually mentions that they're horny, but no. There's definitely a hard 'o' noise in that word and this is Jane Kirk, after all, so he really shouldn't be surprised.

"I suppose," he mutters. Then, just because, "You said horny, right? Not hungry?"

"Well I'm that, too," Jane says, glancing around the room in an appraising way. "But…there's no food in here. There _is_ another person, though. Which would help with the horniness, not the hunger. Unless you're a cannibal. That's usually frowned upon, though." Jane frowns at the ceiling. "There's a quote that goes kind of like that, but I forget where it's from or how it goes…"

Sometimes Jane's mind runs about five thousand miles per second, and Leonard struggles just to keep up. Today is one of those days, he can tell, and she's probably not going to slow down anytime soon. So he sets his PADD aside and smoothes his hands up over her thighs and her hips and says, "Alright, so are you wanting to have sex or get something to eat?" Because he can go for either, although sex first, food later sounds like the best plan lest dinner be an unpleasant affair.

Jane thinks for a minute, then reaches down to unzip the side of her cadet reds skirt. She doesn't like the skirted uniform, but all of her uniform pants are apparently dirty and if there's anything Jane likes less than restricting fashion choices, it's doing laundry.

She pulls it off to reveal a pair of blue panties, lacy around the thighs and between her legs. Leonard swears she has an infinite amount of underwear, because he's never seen her in the same panties twice and she always, always has a matching bra. It's funny, because if Jane were a man she'd be the type to own six pair of underwear, all black, and not even wear them half the time because of the aforementioned dislike of laundry. Alas, however, Jane is a woman, and underwear shopping seems to be her favorite thing.

He figures that it's probably out of some need to reclaim authority over her own wardrobe, considering a Starfleet cadet essentially lives in their reds

"I like these," he murmurs, tracing a finger underneath the lace. Jocelyn never let him touch her like this. She'd been shy her whole life. It wasn't something he loved or hated…it was just a fact. The novelty if being able to touch Jane and look at her with the lights bright and on top of the blankets has not worn off.

"I do too," Jane replies. "They're not my favorite though. Those are the red ones. The boyshorts."

Somehow Leonard knows exactly which ones she's talking about. "Oh yeah. I like those too."

The lace between her legs doesn't offer much coverage. Her _labia majora_ are plump. He hooks his index finger underneath and draws the slip of fabric between her legs to the side. She shivers because it's cold and he shivers because she's got a pretty cunt and his cock fills in his trousers.

"I want to sit on your face," Jane announces.

"Fuck," he mutters, and then, "Yeah, yeah, come here."

She moves up until her thighs are snug under his armpits and he presses his nose onto her golden blonde pubic hair and seals his mouth over her clitoris and sucks. Her hand slams against the headboard and she groans. He smiles against her.

He makes her come twice and when he sits up, his chin and cheeks and nose are glistening wet and the back of his hair is a rat's nest and Jane is panting on the bed, utterly fucked out. He kisses up her belly and along the swell of her left breast. Parts her thighs and comes between her legs, against her but not inside her, and watches his seed drip down her thighs. Closes his eyes.

"Wow."

"I know."

* * *

Sometimes he wishes Jane would act like more of an adult.

She thinks she does act like one, but drinking and sex do not an adult make. Today it seems kind of like she jumped out of bed and rolled around in a pile of clothes and walked out the door in whatever stuck to her. For some reason she seems to be stuck in a perpetual loop of sixteen-year-old girl, despite coming up fast on her twenty-fifth birthday.

"People probably think you're my kid sister or some shit," grumbles Leonard one day, while they're sitting outside at a brasserie by the Bay, it's summer and Jane is leaning far back in her chair with large sunglasses on her face and a glass of something blue in her hand. Andorian passion fruit juice or some shit like that. He really doesn't think any of the ingredients are actually from Andoria, and personally he thinks calling a drink Andorian because it's blue is just about as bad as it would be to call something African because it's brown, but that's neither here nor there.

"People will think whatever they want to think and it won't matter to us because we know the truth," Jane replied, raising her eyebrows and taking a sip of her politically incorrect drink. She crosses one long expanse of bare leg over the other and looks out onto the Bay. She's wearing shorts that he knows started their life as a pair of jeans. Also one of those dumb shirts that have necklines way too wide to stay on both shoulders simultaneously without dipping down to the navel. It's hanging off her right shoulder to reveal the strap of a green camisole and a red bra strap. The shirt itself is white with the image of a blue cartoon bird drinking a martini.

Leonard is really skeptical of her fashion choices sometimes.

"I hate it when you wear sunglasses," he announces, rather than commenting on anything else. "I never know where you're looking."

Jane grins, but keeps looking out towards the Bay. Behind the glasses, though, she could be looking in just about any direction, including out of her periphery at him.

"You just like my eyes."

"I do." Leonard knows Jane knows this, so there's no real point in denying it. "But it's more the fact that conversation is usually improved when the two parties can see each other."

"So, are you gonna complain all day, or…?"

"No," Leonard says grudgingly.

She lifts the sunglasses off her face so they're holding her fringe back and raises an eyebrow. "Happy?"

Leonard rolls his eyes. "Put them back on."

"I thought you wanted them off."

"But you don't want them off, and now you'll pout all day because _You told me to take them off, Bones_ and you'll be fucking miserable to be with, so just put them back on."

"What's your problem? I took them off because I fucking wanted to."

"Damn it, Jane, I don't care what you do with the goddamned things. Wear them, don't wear them, I don't care."

Jane glares at him and sinks down in her chair, swirling her stupid blue fucking drink around in its glass. It's turned her lips vaguely blue and it makes her look like she's freezing cold on a bright, sunny and warm day. Glaring at him like she is, slumped inelegantly in her chair, she looks even more like his pissed off teenage daughter—even though he's probably, admittedly still too young to have a teenage daughter.

"We're fighting over a pair of sunglasses," Jane says. "Do you know how fucking dumb that is?"

What Leonard kind of wants to say is _almost as dumb as the logo on your shirt_, but that would certainly not get him back in Jane's good graces. Instead he replies, "If it wasn't the sunglasses, it would be something else and you know it."

"Yeah…probably." And she smiles, like their fights are something to be proud of, or like it's necessarily healthy to treat arguments as a typical form of communication. When she gets up and stretches with her arms high above her head, he stares at her shapely thighs because they're directly in his line of vision, then gets up himself and walks with her out of the brasserie.

As they walk down the street, she gravitates towards him and his hand somehow finds its way into her back pocket. She feels perfect there, against his side, curves complimenting his angles. She sunglasses find their way back down over her eyes and he feels a bit bad about all of his complaints, but he does wish that she wouldn't try to hold a conversation without giving him vital visual cues like what her eyes are doing behind those giant frames.

"What time is it?" she asks eventually, when they're about halfway back to campus.

He glances at his watch. "Five. Why?"

"Shit," she snaps. "I promised Admiral Archer that I'd walk his diabetic fucking beagle today at five-thirty. Uhg, that's a forty-five minute walk from here."

"Can you reschedule?"

"No, because Archer's going off-planet tomorrow and he's taking the dumb dog with him." She buries one hand in her hair and groans loudly. "Also, I fucking promised him I'd do it, so I'm gonna _do it_. The guy's like a hundred years old so it's not like he can do it himself. He'd break a hip." Glancing around herself, as though a solution will pop out of thin air, she sighs and mutters, "I'm going to have to catch the bus. I'll catch you later alright? Sorry."

He shrugs. "Not like we had anything planned."

"True," she replies and kisses him and turns on her heel. "I'll see you whenever, I suppose."

She waves at him and jogs away and for some reason the compulsion to call _I love you_ at her retreating back comes up, but he just manages to resist it.

Instead he calls, "Be careful!"

She waves a hand and says, "I know!" and even though she can act like such a child sometimes, Leonard thinks that maybe he should give her more credit.

* * *

Jane is short. From what Leonard can gather, she gets it from her mother. He met Winona in person a total of one time, and she came to his shoulder. Jane comes to her mother's nose. So yeah, Jane is quite short. It's misleading, because there are guys who think she's incapable of taking care of herself due to her stature. They're wrong, of course. They're always proven wrong. One of Leonard's favorite things is the expression a misogynistic asshole gets on his face right after he's been flipped over Jane Kirk's shoulder.

Leonard never felt exceptionally tall until he met Jane. He's six foot one, so it's not like he's ever felt short, but he's always been in the range of average when it came to height. Jane, though, is dwarfed by everyone around her, and Leonard feels like he towers over her.

"There's a thing that I need on that shelf. Can you get it for me?"

The shelf in question is the top shelf in her closet, and the 'thing' is an entirely ambiguous object, although it must be in the cardboard box sitting on that shelf because it's literally the only thing there. He's not exactly sure how Jane got it up there in the first place—a step ladder had to have been involved—he dutifully gets up from the bed and reaches up to retrieve the box and set it on the floor. Jane crouches down and opens the box, revealing it to be a pile of PADDs which, upon closer inspection, have the mark of things like the DMV and the State of Iowa on them. She pulls out one particular one, scans it, and sets it on the floor while she puts the lid back on the box.

"That your birth certificate?" he mumbles.

"Yeah," she replies. "Or a copy, anyway. I've kind of neglected to apply for my passport."

"Seriously? You've been in Starfleet for two and a half years and you haven't applied for your passport yet?"

"I've been busy, alright?" she sighs and hands the box to him, adding, "Put that back up, please."

So he does and, when he's done that, looks back down at her on the floor. He says, "It's not like they don't know you were born on a Terran ship, right? I mean, come on."

"Well, unfortunately the Secretary of State office won't give me a passport if I just walk in and say _I'm Jane fucking Kirk_."

Leonard hums in agreement and turns his head sideways so he can read the certificate. He says, "Your middle name is Tabitha? That's what the T stands for?"

"Tell no one," she hisses. "I have almost everyone convinced that my middle name is literally T. Besides, you should fucking talk, _Leonard Horatio_."

"My parents were Shakespeare fans," he mutters.

"Ha, mine were just fucking unoriginal and named me after my grandmothers. I was almost _named_ Tabitha." She shudders exaggeratedly and stands up off the floor. She looks up at him, an inch and a half taller than her than usual because he's wearing boots and she's barefoot. Getting up on her very tip-toes only takes the top of her head up to his chin. "You're so fucking tall, Bones, goddamn. What's the weather like up there?"

"Would you know, it's kind of windy."

Jane grins, eyes twinkling.

Very slowly, Leonard leans down until his face is level with hers once she's flatfooted again. Then he wraps his arms around her middle and tosses her over his shoulder, to a shriek from her.

"Bones! Put me down! Jesus Christ, Bones, Bo—_Leonard_! Put me down. I do not like to be carried Jesus _fuck_!"

He can't help but laugh.

"Are you actually being playful? God, Bones, I didn't think you had it in you." Jane kicks her legs and he lets her down until he can hold her bottom in his hands, and then pushes her against the wall. Her legs wrap around his middle and she glances over his shoulder into the room. Nods. "Yes, I like this angle. Wow, that bookshelf is dusty."

"I told you," he mutters, because he _has_, on several occasions, made a point to tell Jane that horizontal surfaces in her dorm which she can't readily see or access are dirty, but she ignores him. He doesn't really care right now, though, because Jane isn't wearing a bra and her breasts are at eye-level. He flicks out his tongue to lap at a nipple.

"I think I'm beginning to like this whole height difference thing," Jane sighs, and wraps her arms around his head to press him more firmly to her bust.

"I _know_," he mumbles against her skin.

* * *

Captain Jane Kirk is still in her cadet reds, barely an hour into her captaincy when she and Leonard finally get a break after what feels like months of running around. In reality it's only been about six hours, a majority of it was sitting in one place while the graduation ceremony took place. Leonard sits down again, though, this time relaxing into the big, overstuffed armchair that is the only part of home he managed to transport here from Georgia. Jane stands in front of him and looks down on his head.

"Hey," she whispers, and when he looks up she smiles. "I'm a captain."

"I know," he replies, and pulls her close enough that he can press his face into her stomach and breathe her in, because there have been far too many times in the recent past when he honestly thought he'd seen her for the last time.

Into her stomach, he mumbles, "Hey."

"What?"

"I love you."

Jane runs a hand through his hair and whispers, "I know."

_I know_ means a lot of things. It means the obvious, but also things like _I can't say it right now_ and _I'm scared of commitment, mostly because I'm scared of being left alone_ and perhaps most of all _I love you too._

* * *

**End Story**

* * *

Yupyupyup. This is going to be part of a series because I've lost control of my life. Keep an eye out for installments people. They'll all be one shots in the 5 +1 format because I'm not that suicidal.

I hope you enjoyed, thanks for reading.


End file.
